This invention generally relates to the detection of human presence in an indoor environment. More particularly, embodiments of this invention relate to the detection of human presence or absence in an indoor environment using acoustic signals.
Detection of the presence or absence of humans in an indoor environment using acoustic signals is a challenge. Each indoor environment has different sound distributions, different acoustic response, and different acoustic sources. Furthermore, each human occupying the indoor environment has different acoustic traits and occupancy habits. Therefore, developing a detection algorithm that works for all types of indoor environments and humans traits becomes very complex and difficult.
Rather than focusing on a system that works for most scenarios, a more tractable and cost effective approach would be to design a system that works for certain types of indoor environments and human traits. However, such a system has the disadvantage of being too specific and therefore inflexible. There is room for improvement for human presence detection especially in indoor environments. There is a need for a detection system that is sensitive, accurate, has low computational effort, and sufficiently flexible for different indoor environments and human traits.
It will be appreciated that these systems and methods are novel, as are applications thereof and many of the components, systems, methods and algorithms employed and included therein. It should be appreciated that embodiments of the presently described inventive body of work can be implemented in numerous ways, including as processes, apparata, systems, devices, methods, computer readable media, computational algorithms, embedded or distributed software and/or as a combination thereof. Several illustrative embodiments are described below.